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By: CalmLittleBuddy, Christopher M. Dansereau
Aug 13 2015 12:00pm
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Sealed Format. The format of Kings. The format that showcases deckbuilding as well as skill within the game itself without all that annoying draft lingo. Jeez it's like some secret society in those pods. "Never pass Red to your left when the moon is 1.4% full" and "I'm going to cut Brown cards instead of hate drafting that Mythic Uncommon". Freaking mumbo jumbo.

Okay, maybe I'm a little bitter about my terrible run in draft lately. By terrible I mean a 49% win rate, only staying above water money wise by opening 3 of the 5 FlipWalkers (Jace, Gideon and Nissa). It could have been worse.

Bacon Savers

So, to get the foul taste of Draft Disasters out of my mouth, I'm hopping into a format I'm good at. Sealed.

Another important reason I'm heading into Sealed is to get prepared for the Magic Origins Championship staring August 12th. Why not wait for the Standard portion of the Origins Champs? Threefold are my reasons three!

1. Standard is in silly season and I don't enjoy the decks that are viable right now, except Abzan, which I'm burnt out on after my 6 month sojourn into that realm. I don't want to Ensoul Artifact anything. I'm not feeling like Rally the Ancestors is in my wheelhouse. I can't play Green Devotion. Just can't. I'm on Red Deck Wins right now, and even the games I win I feel like I should apologize for being a dink due to how it wins.

So sorry... Really. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to win.

2. Sealed is not a super popular format. That means in a large field like the Magic Online Championship Preliminaries, the competition is a teensy step below the other formats. I know there are Sealed Specialists (I call them Gravy Seals) that will probably nuke my face off for saying that. They work hard grinding Sealed events against each other and get better and better and.... better. Well beyond the limits of normal humans. But most folks jumping into prelims don't play Sealed as often as these Gravy Seals. So if I'm good at Sealed and most of the competitors aren't super experienced, my chances go up. In a really big field I can get further, easier. At least that's my silly plan.

3. It's the first of the Magic Origins Championships Preliminaries to go live. Standard doesn't start until a week later. So, I have nothing to do until then.

So, if it's a good time for Sealed, it's also a good time to write a beginners primer to Sealed. Most of you know most of this. Some of you know all of this. All of you can benefit from seeing some of this. For beginners we start at the beginning. I'm going to use some examples from Magic Origins to illustrate.

What is Sealed Format?

Sealed Format is Magic the Gathering, played by constructing 40 card minimum decks out of the contents of 6 booster packs. You do not get a chance to see what's in the packs until the deckbuilding phase begins. Online, you have 20 minutes to build a deck using the cards you open from those six booster packs, plus any basic lands you want besides what you open. Let's do the fun part first. The math.

6 booster packs each with 15 cards means you will open a total of 60 cards. Not all 60 cards will even be spells. Some are just basic lands. Some are cards but might as well be toilet paper (digital TP in our case). How many playable cards out of those 60 will we need to make a functioning deck? In a normal set without any super weird land interactions, you will be selecting 20 to 28 of those cards to play in your deck (not counting useful sideboard options), and rounding out the rest of the 40 with any basic lands you want (for free? how generous!). So, call it half of the 60 cards.

So, your first job is to select the 30 cards that work best together given the play style of the particular set you are drafting. Sometimes, like with Magic Origins, the format is very 'fast', meaning you need cheap creatures and cheap spells or you run the risk of being beat down before you can even play a spell. Other times, like with the Khans sets, you look for big bombs and make decks that play for time to get you there. We will get into the strategy later. No matter what, you should be looking at the top 30 cards that work together then cutting down to 25 to 23 maybe 22 cards to play.

This is the Deck Building portion of the event. Is there a way to make the process a little quicker? There's a few ways to go about it. First, some Bread.

BREAD

Bombs. Removal. Evasion. Abilities. Dudes. - Okay, this is only one version of BREAD, some folks have letters that stand for something else. This is the one I've always gone with. This is the order you should like at for your cards when evaluating what to play. This is a general rule, and meant to be broken. It's as good of a starting place as any else.

Bombs - This is also one way of deciding which colors to play. If you open a Bomb (a card that, if you get a chance to play it, usually wins the game for you in a few turns), you play the colors to cast it and support it. How do you know which cards are bombs? Just find a guide on Sealed for the set you're playing. Most are pretty universally considered Bombs, so almost any respectable writer will evaluate the Bombs about the same.

BOMB

Sentinel of the Eternal Watch is a straight up Bomb in Magic Origins Sealed because it's a 4/6 for 6 mana that taps down an opponent's creature at the beginning of combat for either player. That means it taps a blocker or an attacker your opponent controls every time combat starts. I am kind of repeating myself here because when you read it, your first instinct is to imagine it does this only on your combat when you own it, because that's typically what a White card would do.

This means your opponent is always down one creature of your choosing. That's good. Very good. You can change the target each combat to suit your needs. Plus a 4/6 is nothing to sneeze at. I've never quite understood that phrase. Kinda makes me a little queasy.

It also has that White Consolation Prize ability, Vigilance. Vigilance is what that new girl gives you on a first date. It's good, but it's still just means she's ready to block if you attack.

Put that all together and you get a pretty sweet card that's going to end most games a few turns after you play it. Unless you're a complete buffoon like me, and can manage to lose with 2 bombs on the board, amirite folks???

Removal - Second best thing you can be doing is stopping your opponent's threats. Removal implies removing the threat from the board, but that's not always the case. Pacifism is a form of removal. Counter spells are a form of removal. Bounce spells like Disperse are a type of removal. Permanent tap down is a form of removal. Damage is a form of removal. Whether it’s Burn, a well-timed Fight ability or a combat trick, doing damage to an opponent's creature can either kill it or force it to sit out combat. Removal is important in Sealed because it is by nature a creature combat based format. You don't get to choose your card pool, so you're usually not building wacky combo decks, or full on burn decks. Stop your opponent's creatures and you're half way to winning.

Examples of removal in each color.

Evasion - Evasion is effects that make your creatures harder to block or kill. Flying is a form of evasion. Most formats have a lower percentage of flying creatures, and only flying creatures or creatures with the Reach ability can block flyers. Protection is a form of evasion. A Green creature cannot block a creature with Protection from Green. Obviously, making your dude unblockable is evasion. Even good old Trample is a pseudo form of evasion. Anything that gets your creatures past blockers without taking combat damage is evasion.

Make all your creatures Evasive!

Abilities - This is what I have for A. Other folks use other words here, but Abilities gets the job done. Any spell, creature or affect that gives you or your creatures powers you didn't have before are what I call Abilities cards. This is important. Many creatures have abilities that trigger when they enter the battlefield. That's known as Value (the capital V means it's important!). If you play a creature, and it kills an opponent's creature when it enters the battlefield, it has given you an advantage beyond just being a thing that can attack and block. Unless it's countered, you get extra value out of playing it. Value can be more or less important depending on the format. It's always good, but how good depends on what the other player can be doing.

Enchantments and instants/sorceries can also be abilities. Most sealed formats have important combat tricks to be aware of when playing. Some of these cards are so useful; you may even put them ahead of some removal and evasion.

This is, ahem, pretty good.

Dudes and Duds - It's important to note. Some dudes (creatures with no extra abilities) are playable. Duds are not. Dudes are your average creature cards. Duds are cards that do nothing important. Some dudes are also duds. A 4 mana 2/2 ground pounder with no extra abilities would be a dud. It costs too much and is strictly worse than other creatures at the same cost. A dud is a card that is so bad that you'd rather play an extra land than have it in your deck. You are usually going to be playing a few dudes. Hopefully you're never forced to play a dud.

A 'Dude'.

A 'Dud'.

Leave the e off for 'eeeewwwwww'.

So, look at all your cards and separate them by BREAD. Got a lot of removal? Maybe make a control deck with a few decent to awesome win conditions. Got a ton of Evasion? Base your deck around the quick kill if you have tiny creatures, or the knockout punch if you have that decently priced 6/6 creature. Got 3 bombs that are on color (meaning they all can be cast with the same 1, 2 or 3 colors)? Play them all and put anything in that lets you survive to play them.

Got no Bombs, very little Removal, a sprinkle of Evasion, a lot of Abilities and a tone of Dudes? Throw together the cheapest dudes you can get and throw abilities on them. This is always a viable plan. Aggro decks that play for quick damage always have a chance because the other deck could draw too many lands, or not enough lands. Opponents make mistakes too. Aggro punishes misplays and bad draws. If your opponent stumbles, you can win if you have the beats.

Are there any other ways to build a deck in Sealed? Of course. Here's a few.

Creature Piles - Separate the creatures from the spells. In a fast, creature heavy format this can be useful. Keep them separated by color for now. Which color, or two colors have the best, most synergistic creatures (ones that do things when they enter the battlefield or pump each other up, or give each other protection or evasion). Once you decide which colors have the best creatures, pull all the decent non-creature spells from those colors and see which ones worl the best with your creature contingent.

Color Coded - If you know which colors are strong, focus on those colors first. If it's a color combination you like, filter through those first. This is especially useful with 'seeded' packs, where Wizards has created special packs that have a better chance of having rares in the color of your choice, but less chance to have them in the other colors. Usually, you get 5 regular packs and 1 seeded pack. Sometimes, you look at the color piles and see a sheer volume advantage. Ever open 6 packs and only seen 5 White cards total? I have. Those had better be some good white cards if I'm going to consider them as my main color.

Archetypes - Some formats have combinations of colors or cards that tend to make consistently good decks with a theme to them. I Magic Origins, there's decks like Blue White Flyers. It is what it says. Blue and White cards with a lot of flying creatures. You could begin by seeing if any of the cards you've opened fit a familiar archetype and build from there.

Strategy

This can vary greatly depending on what sets the packs are from. You should definitely read a format specific guide or two (or twelve) to get a good sense of the proven strategies in that format. That doesn't mean there aren't some solid ideas that work for almost any type of Sealed format. 

Decks are 40 cards minimum.

This is (obviously) 20 cards less than constructed. That's because the power level of the cards drop when they are tossed together in a random pool. 40 cards. That has some serious implications.

You're more likely to draw single card out of 40 than a single card out of 60. I'm not going to bore you with the percentages. You can guestimate that it's close to twice as likely to draw one card out of 40 than 1 card out of 60. So, if you happen to have multiple copies of a card in your sealed deck, expect to draw one at some point in the match.

By extension, you are more likely to draw that expensive or hard to cast card, so your mana curve is much more of a consideration. You want to be frugal with your top end if you can. That card may be a 'bomb' but it's just a doo doo if you can't cast it!

You can play more than 4 copies of a card in your deck.

That's because you're never going to open more than 4 copies of the exact same Mythic, Rare, or even Uncommon. You should definitely read up on the composition of booster packs. Too boring for this article, but useful. Main fact is you only get one Mythic, or Rare, OR FOIL in some cases per pack. Yeah you could by Magic (ha ha ugh) open the exact same 6 Mythic Rares, one from each pack, but you could also randomly grow a monkey factory out of your butt. Physics says so.

Play as many as you want!

(WON'T HELP)

Each format has its own speed.

You need to know this going in. If you don't know much else, you need to know: do I need to be ready for fast, punchy face, or can I get away with playing nothing for a few turns if my late game is decent. You can go against the grain, but you need to know when it's the right idea. The rule I live and die by is you can win in a slower format with a fast deck much more easily that you can win in a fast format with a slow deck. The short version: playing quicker aggro decks is the safest plan if you don't know the format that well.

Fast

Sssssllllloooooowwwwww

It's all about the creatures.

You've heard it before, now hear it again. Creatures and combat take the forefront in Sealed. Because the overall power level of the decks is 'limited' (get it? hey, I don't write these jokes. don't blame me) due to the random nature of the available cards, it's difficult to do anything really broken in Sealed. That means most games you will be killing your opponent the old fashioned way. By throwing beast in that grill. The cheaper, stronger, faster your creatures are,  the more value they generate, the better your chances are to win. The difficult part is sometimes the best creatures are scattered over more than 2 colors. You have to find colors with enough creatures and decent playables to make a viable deck, not just pick two colors because they can cast one good creature.

Sometimes you open a Bomb, but unfortunately the rest of the cards in the colors it takes to cast that Bomb can't support a real deck. Think long and hard if there is any viable way to splash the colors you need to play that Fatty Bombkins. If it's totally off color from your quality cards, then just forget it and move on. If it's only one color off, work it in somehow. 

Speaking of colors...

How many colors should you play in Sealed?

All of them!!! No. Wait. Some of them? Yes. Some of them. You have to consider a few things. Speed of the format. Mana fixing. Dat Bomb. Generally, two colors is the sweet spot for most formats. One color never seems to provide enough playables. I've had some extreme circumstances where a mono deck works out. Usually, it doesn't even get close. Three colors can work if you have a slower format, some decent mana fixing (lands and cards that help you produce the colors of mana you need), and a reason to play those 3 colors, i.e. a card or combination of cards that requires those 3 colors and can outright win the game.

Can you ever play 4 colors in limited? Rarely. Some sets and formats bring that opportunity, but it's not often even in sets that could in theory support it. That's more of a Draft thing, especially in Cube. Even then it's still not the norm.

5 colors are almost always out of the question.

You could try!

IF it were in Magic Origins.

I am here to tell you that mana matters in Sealed. You need your mana on time and on color.

Lands lands lands.

How many lands should a 40 card deck play? The baseline is 16 to 17 lands. I've played as low as 14 and as high as 20 lands in special circumstances. The number of lands and amount of each color is so important in Sealed. Don't just take what MtGO gives you. It's usually not optimized. It's a guess made by a computer. You need to count up how many cards of each color you have, and note how many of those cards have double or triple color casting cost. You may only have 8 Green cards, but if 3 of them cost Double Green to cast, you have to take that into consideration. There is no 'magic formula' to this. I've tried to do it by color percent, using double casting cost cards counting and 1 and 1/2 a card, but even that is not foolproof. Make sure you keep in mind any accelerators, mana fixers, land fetch abilities and such.

Dual lands, fetch lands, and fixers are extremely advantageous in limited as not everyone will have them and they provide great flexibility in building your deck and manabase. Don't forget to look at your lands and mana fixing!

Land Ho!

Research vs. Experience.

Which is more important? Researching a format or playing more events? Hands down it's experience. Research gets you an edge early on, and ensures that you get perspective on what cards to look for and play. It ensures you don't miss ideas and cards hiding in your pool that aren't very obvious. That being said, you don't get good at jumping out of planes by reading G.I. Joe comics. Play. The. Game.

My main weakness is I don't have enough time to play Magic. I don't play the game often enough to be a professional quality player. I do a ton of reading and watching games on Twitch and YouTube because I can't play MtGO on tablets. So, I know a lot about what to do, but often don't do what I should because it's not ingrained in my playstyle from hours of play. Hopefully, now that the house will be sold late August, that will change (update, the deal to sell the house just fell through. okay, that's bad). I am here to tell you 100% for certain that all the research, study and game watching in the world will not improve your game as much as 3 hours of play per night will. When I had that time to dedicate is when my game when through the roof.

This is especially true in any Limited format, as you need to know every card available and how it stacks up in that format. Some cards that are great in Standard don't have enough to support them in Limited. The reverse is also true. Research can tell you this, but only playing will burn that fact into your brain. Also, there's a ton of videos of players playing Standard. There's almost - 14 videos of players playing Sealed. You just can't learn this format on research alone.

The best research you can do is set specific. Google Magic Origins Sealed Review or Limited Review.

How much crossover is there between Draft and Sealed?

75%. That's a made up lie, but it sounds about right. In draft, the card pool is smaller, but you have some control over what you pick. You can shape your deck over the course of the draft. You can angle to cut cards and send signals and blah blah blah here we freaking go again.... 

In Sealed, you get what you get. Drafts have many different what ifs and paths you could have followed. In Sealed, there's usually a 'best deck' you could build with your pool and a few other close options. The same archetypes exist in both Draft and Sealed. Knowing those archetypes from Draft is very helpful. The same cards are playable and unplayable in both formats. In Sealed you are forced to play bad cards more often. You don't always have to play bad cards, but some pools are just so terrible that you'll eventually be forced to play cards you wouldn't dream of playing in Draft.

Does playing Draft make you a better Sealed player? I think it helps a lot. Much more than playing Standard. Draft forces you to hone in an evaluate cards on a deep level. All the cards in the set will be known to you. You'll be able to recognize a 'good deck' a lot quicker. But Sealed is NOT Draft. Draft helps, but playing Sealed is a much better way to get better at Sealed. Duh.

Specific Resources.

Here are just a few specific resources to help your fledgling Sealed career.

Sealed Success - Our very own MarcosPMA has a series that is extremely helpful for any aspiring Sealed Player. I'd read up a little on the basics of the format before diving right in, but this is where I got my first look at Sealed a while back. Awesome, insightful and easy to understand. Well written.

Pack Generators - My favorite is MTGEN.NET but there are many others to choose from. Google. Guggle. McGoggles. These generators create hypothetical card pools for you to look at and determine what sort of decks you could build out of their randomness. Doing this ahead of time is a lot better than doing it for the first time in your Sealed event. You should have at least done a few test runs before playing.

Limited Resources - This is a great Podcast featuring Marshall Sutcliffe and friends on ChannelFireball. I find everything they talk about can be easily applied to Sealed. Tons of card information from pro players who actually play Limited a lot. Everything they say is NOT 100% gospel but it's way better than guessing for yourself.

Beginners Articles - Two good ones. Here and here. Again, you can also make love to the Google with the Sealed Primer in the search and you've got gold, mammie.

I'd write one of those cool conclusion paragraphs, but I'm tired and need to go back to sleep. So, we will continue this talk next week? Great thanks!

 

Until next time

CLB

 

5 Comments

You have a great by deluxeicoff at Thu, 08/13/2015 - 12:42
deluxeicoff's picture
5

You have a great conversational flow to your writing - very easy to read and humorous too - good stuff!

Thanks! I always appreciate by CalmLittleBuddy at Thu, 08/13/2015 - 18:58
CalmLittleBuddy's picture

Thanks! I always appreciate feedback, especially positive. Glad you liked it!

I didn't know you could play by Wikki at Thu, 08/13/2015 - 18:15
Wikki's picture
5

I didn't know you could play more than 4 of a single card in sealed. I don't think I've ever drafted 4 of one common, but good to keep in mind. Also, Sentinel of the Eternal Watch is only on opponents turn, not your turn.

Good stuff.

Crap! Yeah well I never got a by CalmLittleBuddy at Thu, 08/13/2015 - 18:54
CalmLittleBuddy's picture

Crap! Yeah well I never got a chance to play it lol. I read 'each' and then it inserted 'player' into my mind. So, it is only as good as it looks, whcih is still awesome.

And jeez now I hope I got that 4 card thing right, I know it's true in draft and could have sword I've done it in Sealed. I may need to email Mr. Editor Man...

It's for all sealed matches. by CalmLittleBuddy at Thu, 08/13/2015 - 18:57
CalmLittleBuddy's picture

It's for all sealed matches. Whew!